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Leading Lawyers

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On Monday, the Wall Street Journal online wrote:

The Monday-morning quarterbacking continued today on the failed merger between Dewey Ballantine and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Calling the deal an example of how “now not to consummate a merger…”

Dewey, Ballantine has about 550 lawyers; Orrick, about 900.

LegalTimes.com says it’s painful for both firms:

It represents at least the fourth time in four years that Orrick has failed to cinch a merger, prompting speculation about why the firm can’t close these deals…

..Two more partners last week decamped from Dewey, raising the question of whether the departures will mark the tail end of an exodus of more than a dozen partners…
..like many relationships that end badly, each side thinks it’s all the other’s fault.

Why did it happen? WSJ continues:

Dewey is old school, led by chairman Morton Pierce, an attorney first and manager second. Last year, he billed 3,300 hours; in his “spare” time he managed the firm. “Management is not my passion,” he admits.

Orrick chairman Ralph Baxter Jr., meanwhile, is a more modern, CEO-type leader; he doesn’t practice law, spending all of his time meeting recruits and clients and jetting to the firm’s offices around the world.

The comments on the WSJ blog boil down to:

“How can the chairman of a 550-lawyer firm legitimately bill 3,300 hours?”

But that’s not the right question. The right question is,

“How can someone who bills 3,300 hours legitimately be described as managing, much less leading, a 550-lawyer firm?”

The issue isn’t integrity of billings—it’s seriousness of leadership.

The narrowest definition of management in the law business includes checking timesheets, hiring and firing based on numbers, and hosting a few annual events. It doesn’t involve articulating a market position 5 years hence, not to mention how to get there, how to align an organization, or how to develop human beings.

Mr. Pierce is not alone. Among the professions, law is—in general, by and large—the most anarchically managed. To be fair, this is partly an outgrowth of the nature of the business itself.

Another obstacle is low trust. David Maister quotes a former law firm managing partner, “It’s not that I don’t trust my partners. They’re good people, mostly. It’s that I don’t want to have to trust them. Why give up any degree of control over your own affairs if you don’t have to?”

But industry is not destiny. Larry Bodine notes that 5 law firms made the “best places to work in the US,” including one at #16. In Canada, a law firm is #4 (see this post on Trust and Law Firms). Leadership is a prime suspect in this aberrant behavior.

The best argument for Mr. Pierce’s model is that partners respect a practicing lawyer. This parallels Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska’s response to accusations of mediocrity: “the country has a lot of mediocre people, and they deserve representation too.”

The belief that widget-making is the best qualification for leading widget-makers is alive and well in the law business (I like to think Nebraska evolved).

It’s a belief that implies surgeons, architects, financial planners, accountants and actuaries are all equal in their leadership capabilities. It also belies a belief about leadership that there is no ‘there’ there.

Which firm’s leadership model would you trust over the next 10 years?
 

Trust Tip 12: Telling Tough Truths

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(Apologies to those who get my blog by email: you got it 3 times. Cause? Human error—mine. The link is live now, and I won’t make that mistake again.)

Truth-telling is easy with little at stake. If we’re asked at a party, “How long have you been with XYZ,” we’ll answer, “almost six months.”

But if a prospective client asks us, enquiring about our credentials, “How long have you been with XYZ?” we’re tempted to say, “oh, a bit under a year.”

The more at stake, the more we manage, spin, tweak, massage and control the truth. After all, the tough situations demand that we put our best foot forward, make sure the client is fully informed about the full breadth of our capabilities. And we’d hate to lose the job for not appearing confident and aggressive about our abilities and our desires.

Yet our instincts here are dead wrong.

When there’s more at stake, the value of direct truth-telling is higher, and the risk lower, than the course of “managing” the truth.

Here’s why, and how.

Choose an issue critical to your client. Do you have the experience to help? Do you have the capabilities? The industry knowledge? The judgment? The connections? A solid methodology?

Clients want answers to these questions because they believe they affect work quality. Clients need to feel confident in their assessments of you. If you speak the truth, you help them gain that confidence in their assessment. If you are perceived to be “managing” the truth, they will have less confidence in their assessments.

They will also be annoyed at your attempt to put your interest ahead of theirs. That leads to still less trust.

Truth-managing thus decreases client satisfaction and trust. Straight truth-telling enhances both.

“Hey, hang on a minute—we’re trying to get the job!”

Managing the truth has two likely outcomes. You may get the job—then run the risk of not living up to expectations. Or, you lose it because they felt you were stretching the truth.

The first is pretty bad, but less common than we think, because we’re not as good as we think at fooling clients. But the second is bad too—it ruins our reputation and future prospects.

By contrast, if you tell the truth and get the job, then the client has chosen you for exactly what you claim to be. You start off with a sound and truthful relationship, instead of endlessly managing expectations.

If you tell truth and don’t get the job, you’ll probably get straight feedback about why you didn’t get it. Truth-stretching firms don’t get such feedback.

More importantly, you walk out with a reputation for truth-telling. This increases your likelihood of being called back when they need just what you have, and of getting positive referrals.

How do you tell the straight-up truth when all your instincts say to tweak it?

Meditate, then rehearse.

Meditate on all the reasons above why you’re better off telling the truth. Don’t just learn them, believe them.

Find your own one-liner responses to the tough questions: they can be cute, or funny, or neither. The one thing they must be is straightforwardly truthful.

The key is the meditation, not the rehearsal. Once you believe and accept that truth-telling is a best practice, the rehearsal becomes easy.

Because it takes remarkably less energy to speak the truth than to speak any other version of reality.

 

 

Myers-Briggs and Racism

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I taught a leadership seminar on building trusted relationships. A few attendees got impatient. At first, I wasn’t clear why. “This is too simple,” they said; “where’s the tough stuff from the book?”

What they wanted was more categories, patterns of resistance, 2×2 matrices, rules for generating trust in different kinds of roles and situations, with differing backgrounds and personalities.

The material I had been talking about—listening from curiosity, thinking out loud, empathy, understanding before recommending, massively open questions, etc.—felt basic to them.

Where was the advanced course, they wanted to know.

I’ll call this the Myers-Briggs syndrome—the belief that the critical and difficult task is to understand the world. Properly understood, execution is easy.

It’s a lie.

Myers-Briggs itself is fine. It describes four personality types, and how each, as a rule, behaves distinctly. The data are solid, and widely accepted. The point, MB analysts say, is to take tendencies—yours and others’—into account in interactions.

It is useful in aggregative tasks: team-formation, setting recruiting goals. On individual interactions, it’s trickier.

MB analysts caution against flatly applying generalizations to individuals. But—in my experience—users treat that disclaimer as seriously as the fine print on an aspirin bottle.

Categorizing is invaluable for managing inventory turns, strategies, long tails, receivables and production runs.

The power of Myers/Briggs lies in categorizing people. That’s also the charm of stereotypes. When I meet you for the first time and learn you’re from London, I may say, “Ah, so you’re English!” with the self-satisfaction of revealed insight in my voice. Click. It all fits.

But—if you’re the Englishman (or woman), your reaction is, “click—I just got put in a box.” The woman executive asked to get coffee knows the shock of being labeled. So does Jose-Miguel from Spain—when he’s visiting the US. Black Americans know it as a way of life.

Categorization is useful. Unfortunately, we slide easily from categorization to objectification. Some categorizations, like Myers/Briggs are politically correct—-e.g. “You’re such an INTJ, you’re classic!” Others are not. Try substituting “black man” for “INTJ” in that sentence.

Understanding categories is intellectually rewarding, like a rich crossword puzzle.

But categorization rarely creates trust—more often, it destroys it.

Trust is largely personal. I am not my alma mater, my race, my age, my height, my language, my nationality, my looks. My category doesn’t trust you—I do. Or not.

Treat me as category, and you reduce my trust in you. Apparent compliments—“ooh, you went to Harvard, my, you’re an ENTJ”—are either shallow or not compliments at all. They objectify me. People resist being labeled—we want to be accepted as unique wholes.

The advanced course is not about categorization: it’s about interacting from the heart without labels.

When you give a presentation, the trick is to prepare—then be prepared to throw it all away.

In advance of meeting someone, it’s respectful to do some homework on them. But the meaning of the homework has to be discovered anew in the meeting.

To interact with freshness, curiosity and genuine interest, instead of resentment, fear, disgust, anger, expectations, manipulation, hidden agendas, pre-set outcomes, stereotypes or labels—that’s the advanced course.

Trust comes from the heart, not the brain. Heart work is a lot tougher.

And they don’t teach it at Harvard Business School.

 

Fear and Loathing at the Office

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Business Week’s cover story (Jan. 22, 2007 issue) is called “Sweet Revenge: the Power of Retribution, Spite and Loathing in the World of Business.”

It’s a fun read, dishing classic stories ranging from how Cornelius Vanderbilt got even (“I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you”), to Katzenberg vs. Eisner (Hollywood dustups are the most entertaining) to Michael Dell vs. Steve Jobs (the jury’s still out on this one, though as of today Jobs has the edge).

There are a few insights: "The simplest way to create a culture is to pick an enemy," says Garnett [CEO of Ingres, and one of many enemies Oracle’s Larry Ellison appears to have crated over the years.] "We have an enemy: It’s Oracle."

And, “Revenge is a response to a perceived injustice or what psychologists call narcissistic injury, known to you and me as a wounded ego. This reaction is often acute in entrepreneurs or members of family businesses, whose sense of self-worth is bound to their businesses.”

But for the most part, this article describes, rather than diagnoses. But that’s not because the topic is without implication.
The incidence of revenge, and its motivational power, stand in contradiction to what business education describes as the way things get done.

College business courses and MBA programs teach rational decision-making; hypotheses and evidence, decision trees, net present value, hurdle and discount rates, the 4Ps. Not much time on dealing with vengeful bosses or peers.

People have strong feelings—revenge, love, lust, justice—which affect not just the workplace, but top-level strategies and the makeup of entire industries. Yet this is not, for the most part, taught.

It’s not taught to chemistry majors either.  Or actuaries.  But we expect it of business—I think of business as practical, applied economics.  Yet increasingly it is the theory that is taught, not the application.  (See also my posting  “Harvard Business School 30 Years Later: Bring Back Joe”).

Teaching theory alone is like learning a language solely through the dictionary.  Should business explain the world, or teach about managing in it?  The former doesn’t guarantee the latter.

I’m for teaching people to change the world, not just understand it. Vengeance 101, anybody?

Trust Tip 15: Make the Purchasing Agent Your Client

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Until three years ago, I had heard about it, but hadn’t yet seen it.

Then I saw the resume of a Fortune 100 Commodity Purchasing Manager. At the top, it said:

Manage the following Global Business Commodities:

  • control packaging
  • mailing & fulfillment
  • signage
  • design, printing & duplicating
  • sub-contract labor
  • consulting services
  • information technology services.

Wait a minute: consulting services? Along with signage? And Mailing & fulfillment? Does this mean the guy who buys signs and postage meters also handles negotiations with McKinsey?

Not quite. But directionally, yes.

There has been a trend to formalize, professionalize, depersonalize, whatever you want to call it, the buying of services. You’re finding much more involvement of purchasing departments, RFPs, 3rd party buyer consultants and the like.

What’s your first response when you’re told you have to go through purchasing? Usually, it’s “how do we comply minimally, while carefully end-running the purchasing guy to get back to my customer.”

Don’t do it. The purchasing department buyer is your new client. Treat him or her as such.

Look at it from his point of view. Management has asked him to manage costs, while maintaining quality. 80% of the message is about costs. But he’s savvy enough to know that if he goes with a low quality choice, his internal users will never let him hear the end of it.

So how does it affect him when a potential buyer tries the end-run on him?

Don’t you be the one who tries it. Be the one who respects him.

Treat him as the new client. Understand his needs. Listen to what he wants. Don’t pull the switcheroo, give him what he asks for.

Offer advice without being asked—but only if it’s useful to him. Suggest that you offer some free ideas: and that he solicit ideas from your competitors too.

Client focus beats self-focus. R espect the new rules of the game. If you do that, at the very least you’ll get a fair shake. More likely, you’ll get a chance to demonstrate more added value.

That’s how you create trust in the new game. And that’s good for both parties.

I’m OK, You’re an Idiot

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In 1967, Thomas Harris wrote “I’m OK, You’re OK,” arguably the most famous use of a 2×2 matrix (with cash cows/dogs/stars and question marks a close second).

Today’s Big Western Wisdom is Positive Psychology; see the NYTimes’ Happiness 101.

I think I’m OK, You’re OK is a terrific book; and the wisdom in positive psychology is timeless, universal, and very valuable.

But I also think they both leave something on the table.

Do you, like me, advise or influence others for a living? Then you may suspect that Harris pulled punches. My inner voice says:

“I’m OK, you’re an idiot,”

and

“You’re OK, I’m an undetected fraud.”

If you’re like me, those two mantras rent space in our heads almost simultaneously. We are (or is it just me?), as Bill Wilson put it, insecure egomaniacs, buffeted by a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

IOYO and PP suggest we get in the flow, bliss out, focus, be aware, accept, be happy.

Well, yes—and no.

To do great work, being a little nuts sometimes helps. The trick is not to kill the beast within, but to feed it—while keeping it in the cage.

St. Augustine saw value in suffering. Nietzsche wrote of the spiritual bankruptcy of serenity (as did Seinfeld). Carlos Castaneda, in Journey to Ixtlan, portrays alienation as the spawn of wisdom. In William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, the twice-born are way more interesting than the once-born. Artists know what doesn’t kill you makes you—more creative.

An ex-boss, when I told him sadly I was getting divorced, said, “Congratulations! What a wonderful learning opportunity!” Turns out he was right.

I once showed a CEO the results of a psychological survey of his top 20 consultants. “Jim,” I said nervously, “the shrink says these are not the profiles of psychologically balanced, healthy people!”

Jim looked up at me patiently, and said, “Yeah?”

He was right too.

The day my pulse doesn’t jump twenty points in the first client meeting is the day I’ll leave the profession—suffering either from arrogance, indifference, or burnout.

The challenge is to be constructively schizophrenic—to harness the power of the dark side and channel it.

So here’s my reformulation:

“I’m an idiot, you’re an idiot. So let’s get over it, let’s work together and let’s do something great.”

(Credit where due: Anthony de Mello said it first—"I’m an ass, you’re an ass." As he said, it’s about ego deflation.)

David Maister wrote, “the problem is never what the client said it was in the first meeting.” He didn’t exaggerate.

Jeff Thull says the inability of clients to fully understand the solution is the hallmark of complex organizations in today’s world.

So clients suffer from the idiot disease as well—they suspect their ignorance, as we do.

But we’re sicker—painfully aware of what we don’t know, yet also knowing it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Paranoia is rational. And yet—this is great news.

If—a big “if”—we can jointly accomplish the ego deflation inherent in “I’m an idiot, you’re an idiot,” then:

  • we don’t wast time posturing
  • There are no dumb questions
  • We are free to help each other
  • The Not Invented Here syndrom Disappears
  • We can seek each other’s advice – and offer it freely
  • We can produce some really, truly, scary good work.

I like to think we can keep the edge. A Netscape programmer in the heady early days of Web 1.0 wrote, “We come into this world naked, bloody and screaming; but if you play your cards right, it doesn’t have to stop.”

Don’t settle for serenity alone. Be a cynic who trusts. Seek dare-to-be-great humility. Embrace your idiocy and leverage it. Don’t worry—be happy.

As one famous control freak advisor puts it—“It’s a Good Thing.”

Trusted Advisor: From Russia, With Love

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In 2000, I co-wrote The Trusted Advisor with David Maister and Rob Galford. It has been translated into several languages, including Russian.

Yesterday, Maister received an email from Russia, which he passed along to me. The enthusiasm burst through the language barrier so charmingly that I wanted to post it. Here it is, unedited except for his name.

Dear M-r Maister!

Great interest, intellectual amusement and deep YESSS! – that’s what I’ve felt reading the Russian translation of your The Trusted Advisor".
15 years of psychotherapy and psychological consulting – dysfunctional families, drug addicts, co-dependency – have lead me to the very similar proposals; but you and your colleges formulate it (and help me to formulate my own experience) with the elegance of gathered Rubik’s cube.

You see – psychological consulting have some specific nature: client’s business there is just his personal, very and only personal area. But the question of trust, the stages and technology" of it’s establishing, danger of methodical occupation" instead of personality-oriented approach and many other aspects, underlined in your remarkable book, are quite the same (and even more important) as in other areas of consulting.

Thank you for your deep and consistent humanism. Adler can have some rest (as Russians say) – his ideas of contradiction between the neurotic behavior and cooperation finds in your book very practical actualization.

What a joy for me was to see, that the main principle of my practice – each problem of client is the challenge, opportunity for personality (not only professional!) growth of advisor, and if the last miss this opportunity and doesn’t grow – he can’t help the client – is one of the main points of your book; it is not formulated, but each line affirms that!

Once again thank you; I wish you, your friends and your families more successes, joyful opportunities, new horizons and grateful readers!
K.L., Russia.

P.S. I sincerely hope, that the remarks about my professional experience is not the trespass of demonstrating competence; that pointed parallels doesn’t look like as inadequate self-orientation; that underlined principle is not a demonstration of value-intervention"; and that the hole letter is not the trespass of compliments.

And sorry for my, may be,terrible English!

Not so terrible at all, I think.

Faking Sincerity: The Case of Loyalty

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The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog got? Four—because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

Or so you would think.

But not if you’re in the mainstream of what I’ll broadly call the customer satisfaction business. In that case, there are a lot of multi-legged dogs out there, based on what’s being called “loyalty.”

The “customer loyalty” movement started in the early 90s with Fred Reicheld at Bain, and Jim Heskett and Len Schlesinger at Harvard Business School. The idea was simple, elegant, and empirically airtight—companies with loyal customers were way more profitable. More profitable, in fact, than the leading paradigm of being number one or number two in market share.

They described the components that created loyalty—familiarity, collaboration, switching costs, the creation of common attitudes. As an indicator of loyalty, they chose customer retention. It was great work.

“Loyalty” was a powerful choice to describe the phenomenon. It conjured up “semper fi,” “’til death do us part,” “greater love hath no man than this…” Dictionary synonyms include fealty, devotion, and honor. Loyalty is a virtue.

The choice of words made you sit up and take note.

Well, 15 years ago it did. Things have changed. Today:

Websites discuss price promotions for “loyalty” programs.

A major global IT consultancy advertises its “loyalty factory.”

A world-leading customer service organization equates loyalty with share of wallet.

Exemplifying the new "up is down" thinking, an article says "customer loyalty is the result of well-managed customer retention programs."

Guess what the results of such instrumentalism are? Lower loyalty.

Customer retention was originally an indicator of loyalty. In a bizarre form of business idolatry, the indicator has been substituted for the real thing. (Kind of like the Lakers’ coach saying to me, “Green, put on this Kobe Bryant shirt and go sub for him—maybe no one will notice the swap.” Except here it’s working.)

We’ve taken a supremely emotional word and stripped emotions from it. “Old” loyalty is about intentions and motives; new “loyalty” couldn’t care less about motive—results are all that matter. “Old’ loyalty is about relationships. New “loyalty” is about behaviors—yours, insofar as it benefits me. The only relationship involved is that between your money and my pocket.

Loyalty is just one example. The language of business has morphed from the human commercial relationship between buyer and seller to the financial one between buyers and shareholders. The preferred psychology of business has become Skinnerian, not emotional.

Managing customer relationships is coming to mean measuring just how much of just what kind of food is needed to get the rats to click just the right bar. Who needs relationship skills when you’ve got goals, behaviors, measurements and rewards?

It’s infecting evaluation systems too. How’m I doing? I don’t care to know, unless you input the data into the survey links to my milestones. And would you agree completely, strongly, or just generally, that I provided you with excellent service today?

With a US and global gap between haves and have-nots driving a social crisis larger every day, this mechanistic thinking serves everyone badly. We need business leaders and managers who can conceive of commercial relationships in human terms. We need business institutions that take their share of responsibility for molding our human future, not just our behaviors.

Language matters. A lot. When smart, decent people sincerely say loyalty means share of wallet, when major companies talk about loyalty “factories” with no sense of irony, when leading business publications adopt and promulgate shifts in language with no comment, when we mistake side effects for causes—then we have lost not just a word, but the concept it referred to.

Imagine seeing a dog waiting patiently for its master—and having no word to describe the phenomenon. The dog will not behave differently for our want of vocabulary. But we will have lost the ability to articulate a virtue, receiving in return only a new word for price-shopping.

That would sincerely be a shame. (No, really, it would be! I’m not faking it!)

(The tail and leg joke is Abe Lincoln’s. I’ve heard the sincerity joke variously attributed: my guess is George Burns. Do you know? Do tell.)

 

Trust Tip 47: Subsidize Marketing with Sales

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Monday night I got an email. It was from a 50-ish owner of a small CPA firm—call him “Bob”—with three competing offers to buy his practice, and a few complicating life factors. He wanted advice, and wondered if we could talk.

I don’t do much coaching or consulting, and he almost surely couldn’t afford my rates. I am not an expert in life planning, or in valuations.

So of course I said sure, call me in the morning, we’ll talk—no charge.

We had a very good chat for about 45 minutes.

I think I helped him. I know it was useful for him to talk to a third party able to comprehend his situation. I believe he’ll make a better decision, and I’m sure he’ll feel better about it. Value was created for him in our talk.

But what about me? I knew going in there was no chance of a sale from him—not now, not in the future, not anytime. And my rate was zero.

I like doing nice things, but I’m not a saint. Nor did I consider Bob a pro bono case. It was a good thing to do: but, I would argue, it was also good business.

Sometimes a lead that we would otherwise screen out can be a good marketing investment. Sometimes you can do well by doing good. Sometimes we need to let sales leads bleed into marketing budgets.

“Bob” will never buy from me (though other Bobs might). But he will remember what I did for him; even more, that I was willing to help.

Bob is someone who cared enough to identify alternatives, choose me, and seek me out. He spent time to find out who I was, what I did, whether and how I might be useful to him. He was probably willing to pay for consulting. He was an educated, willing buyer, a near-client with influence on other potential clients.

For me, he was not a qualified sales lead. But—he was one helluva marketing resource.

He now knows me—the sound of my voice, how well I think on the spot, the way I interact, my sense of humor. He knows me better than one of 200 people in an audience for a speech; much better than 500 people reading this blog; and way better than 5000 people reading an article of mine.

Total investment: 45 minutes.

The return? Bob will tell X people about our discussion. That’s X people who will hear first-hand about a 1-to1 interaction. That’s a powerful testimonial.

The choice is not between being “good” or making money; they often go together.

A few hours per month, shift your sales practices to subsidize your marketing by investing in a lead.

Don’t get lost in charge-back accounting. The benefits will eventually accrue to your firm, and to you personally. Both.

Yet another win-win.

 

The Perversity of Measuring Trust

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I once consulted to a convenience store chain with 150% store manager turnover. Turns out they gave lie detector tests to each manager every month to cut down on theft. The frequent measurement sent a message to managers— “someone must be getting away with this, maybe I’ll try it.” Click. Results perverted.

The Gallup Management Journal has a piece titled “Engaging Customers—All Day, Every Day.” Here’s how they tee up the issue:

It’s tough to exaggerate the importance of customer engagement. Fully engaged customers deliver a 23% premium over average customers in share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth, according to Gallup research, while actively disengaged customers represent a 13% discount on the same measures…

So, considering the amount of money on the line, it pays to scrutinize every single customer-employee encounter. That’s exactly why so many call centers survey customers to determine their level of engagement.

But what happens between measurements? At best, customer service representatives (CSRs) see their customer scores once a month. Many CSRs only get their scores quarterly or annually. It’s difficult to sustain energy and focus on customer engagement when the feedback is infrequent. The challenge for team leaders and managers becomes finding ways to keep CSRs committed to engaging their customers, even when new data isn’t available. Specifically, how can team leaders keep customer engagement from feeling like an isolated event, rather than a way of doing business?

Note two assumptions the article makes:

1. The purpose of all this “customer engagement” stuff is to increase share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth for the seller;

2. The ideal management tool for accomplishing the above would be massive feedback in the form of customer survey data—way more frequently than monthly.

This is perverse on so many levels I don’t know where to start. Let’s look at just three.

Perversity number one: the advice that Gallup then serves up is excellent—and has almost nothing to do with their premise. Their advice is to establish emotional connections with customers across four levels of customer engagement—Confidence, Integrity, Pride, and Passion—and they give excellent advice about how to do it. Well done.

Why oh why, then, do they position this advice as being the fallback alternative to multiple choice phone surveys? When was the last time you filled out a “how did we do” survey except when you were pissed off? The data are necessarily non-specific, post-hoc, and suspect. Why do we think it better than real-time good supervisory feedback?

Perversity number two: mistaking the end for the means. If integrity is in service to making a buck, why should anyone trust you? Faking sincerity is a con job.

No one knowingly trusts a con man—because he’s in it for himself. Companies who say the purpose of customer service is to make money are simply con men who are more up-front about their goal.

Make profit an outcome, not a goal. If you make it a goal, you sow distrust. If your goal in establishing trust is to make money, you will lose both.

Perversity number three: believing that extrinsic measures are better than intrinsic ones. If the system rewards and encourages me for going from a weekly score of 3.5 to one of 3.6, then I will obsess about tricks, tweaks and tunings. If you then peg my compensation to it, you can be sure the last thing I’ll think about is true customer connection. Click. Results perverted.

Read Alfie Kohn’s fine book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes. Someone who actually cares about me will beat the pants off someone who fakes caring to make money off me. And ironically, the first person is far more profitable anyway. As a byproduct.

Do what Gallup recommends as second best; it beats the hell out of massively focusing on extrinsic measures. And not just for convenience store managers.